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Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy

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VI. After virtue and Marxism: A response to Wartofsky

Alasdair MacIntyre

Vanderbilt University ,
Published online: 29 Aug 2008.

To cite this article: Alasdair MacIntyre (1984) VI. After virtue and Marxism: A response to Wartofsky, Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary
Journal of Philosophy, 27:1-4, 251-254, DOI: 10.1080/00201748408602023
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00201748408602023

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Inquiry, 27, 251-4

Symposium: Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue* (cont. from Vol. 26, No. 4)

VI. After Virtue and Marxism: A

Response to Wartofsky
Alasdair MacIntyre
Downloaded by [Monash University Library] at 06:27 23 April 2015

Vanderbllt University

My response to Wartofsky's questions concerning why the Aristotelian tradition of

the virtues was rejected and why individualist modes of thought found such ready
acceptance is to sketch the kind of historical narrative which I take it must be
written if his questions are to be adequately answered. I identify one source of
difference between us in the varying extent to which he and I have rejected Marxist
modes of thought.

Marx Wartofsky makes three central criticisms of After Virtue. The first
concerns why individualist theories came to flourish and to be adopted as
the legitimating expression of modern social institutions and modes of
behavior. Wartofsky suggests that I bestow on the history of philosophical
theory an autonomy that it does not in fact possess and points to the
absence in After Virtue of any adequate social history as a counterpart to
the history of theory. What that absence, on Wartofsky's view, deprives
me of is the possibility not only of any adequate explanation of why
individualist theory flourished, but also of any adequate understanding of
the kind of mistake involved in coming to accept it. I need to supply a
better account of the genesis of what I take to be peculiarly modern errors.
A second criticism suggests that the rejection of the Aristotelian tradition
of the virtues at the threshold of modernity was at least as much a matter
of failures internal to the version of that tradition embodied in the social
forms of the later middle ages as it was of the several challenges presented
by emerging individualist modernity. Had the medieval world successfully
preserved the virtues, then surely it would have been in a better position
to confront those challenges than it in fact proved to be.
Wartofsky's third criticism is about the grounds for social hope in the
present. Wartofsky identifies himself as what he calls a Left-Wing Meliorist,
one who believes that within the present social order resources for its
substantial improvement can be found, and voices a suspicion that I am
* Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Duckworth, London 1981,
ix + 252 pp., 24.00. Page references in parentheses are to this work.

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252 Alasdair Maclntyre

not. He is right; and indeed I can find no place for myself within his political
typology. Certainly there are goods to be achieved and evils to be averted
in the present and the immediate future. But any systematic political action
of a conventional kind involves a commitment to the dominant social order
of the present, a commitment which I reject. This does not entail a
regression to either of the positions that Wartofsky calls Restorationist and
Revolutionary; for I do not see any prospects of overthrowing the dominant
social order. But perhaps it can be outlived; and even if it cannot be
overthrown, it ought to be rejected. The grounds for hope lie in that from
the premodern past which has survived the worst that the dominant social
order of modernity has been able to visit upon it.
All three of Wartofsky's criticisms spring from a major preoccupation
which he and I share. The history of philosophy has for the most part been
written in almost complete abstraction from social history; social history
in turn is generally written as though intellectual history were at best an
epiphenomenon; and the compartmentalization of various strands within
our social and intellectual history does still further damage. In Chapter 5
of After Virtue I said a little, but too little, about this. And it is a measure
of the appositeness of Wartofsky's criticisms that the project of which After
Virtue is a first sketch will on my own view remain radically incomplete
until its narrative history is written in such a way that clarity of analytical
structure and richness of contingent detail combine to provide adequate
answers to Wartofsky's three questions. But I am as yet unable to do more
than gesture in the direction of such a history. All that I can provide in
response to Wartofsky's questions therefore are signposts towards answers
rather than answers.
Any set of social relationships which embodies the tradition of the virtues
is bound to be vulnerable and fragile. For the pursuit of those institutional
goods without which the social framework within which the virtues are
practised cannot be sustained - such goods as those of power and money
- is always at best in tension with the asceticism in respect of such goods
required by the Aristotelian virtues of temperateness and justice. Being
virtuous may on occasion be the cause of being socially and politically
defeated, an insight whose classical statement is by Machiavelli. So that
my own central theses are not only consistent with, but actually require
that I find plausible the thesis that the late medieval defeat of the tradition
of the virtues derived from its own internal weakness, rather than from the
nature of its external rejection. But any such explanation woujd have to
be supplemented at least by an account of a conceptual transformation
which played a key part in promoting both the internal weakness and the
external rejection.

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After Virtue and Marxism 253

There is a sharp contrast between the self-aggrandizing drive for power
and money in the European communities of the twelfth and even the
thirteenth century and that drive in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
a contrast signalled by the different ways in which the relationship of the
self to what it possesses is conceptualized. The self comes to acquire the
status of 'the individual'; the individual becomes defined as that which is
capable of making contracts; anything in the self s environment becomes
potentially the property of some individual, so that anything at all - land,
money, labour - may be treated as property; property, being the
subject-matter of contracts, becomes envisaged in terms of commodities;
it so becomes possible to think of any human subject-matter in economic
terms; land, money and labour themselves all become commodities.
The process which I thus describe extended far back into the middle
ages and was not completed until the nineteenth century. It was a matter
of many different changes gradually acquiring a cumulative effect, so that
the nature of those various changes only became apparent retrospectively.
Indeed it is only because the outcome was what it was that those changes
have the nature that we now ascribe to them. But in order for those changes
to occur there had first to be individuals who had already separated themselves or were separated from those roles within tradition-bearing communities which defined the self in ways incompatible with emergent individualism. It is a story that has been told often enough and subjected to
radical criticism quite as often. Clearly I am committed to holding that
some version of this story has successfully survived such criticism at least
in essentials. The version that I judge to be thus vindicated is that of Karl
Polanyi's The Great Transformation (for a summary of relevant criticisms,
see Charles P. Kindleberger's discussion of it in Daedalus, Winter 1973,
Vol. 103, No. 1, pp. 45-52).
Wartofsky contrasts an orthodox Marxist account of this transformation
with the kind of account that would be given by a Marxism 'not wedded
to the one-way causality of "base and superstructure"' and both to Weberian analysis (p. 245). But my preference for Polanyi's type of narrative is
that it avoids the methodological mistakes which all three of these share,
most notably the error of supposing that we can identify economic or social
factors independently from ideological or theoretical factors in such a way
as to produce causal explanation of a cogent kind. My thesis is not that
we cannot distinguish economic or social items from ideological or
theoretical items; there is indeed more than one way of marking such a
distinction. But when we try to understand the narratives of historical
change in terms of any one of these sets of distinctions, the causal explanations which they yield are generally implausible. It is only when we

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254 Alasdair Maclntyre

understand and categorize the social and economic phenomena in such a
way as to recognize that agents' and participants' understanding of social
and economic activity is integral to and partially constitutive of the characteristics of such activities that we provide characterizations which enable
us to write rationally defensible explanatory narratives. Karl Polanyi's was
just such a narration.
It is of course important to acknowledge the extent to which Karl
Polanyi's methods in writing history were indebted to Marx's. He was one
of those writers who discarded a good deal of Marx's theoretical framework,
while preserving - it may not be too much to say, precisely with the purpose
of preserving - Marx's historiographical insights and even extending them.
And it is I believe from Marx's historiography that we all still have a great
deal to learn. The same is not true of Marx's politics or indeed of his vision
of the future more generally. And I suspect that at the deepest-level what
divides Wartofsky and myself on issues of the politics of the present and
the future is the degree to which he is still committed to neo-Marxist modes
of analysis.